FP Transitions connects HubSpot & SugarCRM to get more out of both systems

Background on FP Transitions - Company, Sales & Marketing

Zak: Can you start by giving us background on FP Transitions - what you do, and whom you market to?

Elise: We serve independent financial services practices, with services to help them manage the succession planning of their businesses and transferring ownership from one generation to the next. We are most known for our creation of the largest open market for buying and selling financial services practices.

Zak: What is your overall marketing philosophy and approach?

Elise: We have an integrated marketing approach. As we are targeting financial advisors, there are traditional marketing channels like print advertising and direct mail that continue to perform for us.

We’ve coupled that with an inbound strategy, focusing on content, education and providing value to our target audience. Clients use FP Transitions as a trusted resource, so building trust through relevant content fits nicely into this.

Sales & Marketing Systems - Adding HubSpot to SugarCRM

Zak: Can you give us background on your sales and marketing systems?

Elise: We use SugarCRM as our system to power sales and our back office systems. Our sales, finance and operations teams are using SugarCRM on a daily basis. We’ve heavily customized it to meet our needs. It’s provided a lot of flexibility for customization over the years.

When we set out to get a new marketing system, HubSpot was very appealing to me as it could serve as a single tool for us to manage many different marketing touchpoints. When we were evaluating HubSpot, we knew that we would need a third party integration to connect HubSpot and SugarCRM. Our HubSpot salesperson recommended Bedrock Data, as having a proven, easy approach for connecting HubSpot and SugarCRM, while bringing us expertise around both systems in addition to software. This HubSpot and SugarCRM expertise was appealing to us.

The HubSpot-SugarCRM Integration

Zak: What are some of the keys to the HubSpot-SugarCRM integration for you?

Elise: Leads come in through HubSpot, and, once qualified, are automatically pushed from HubSpot into SugarCRM. We have mapped key marketing fields from HubSpot to SugarCRM so that we have visibility to that data in SugarCRM - which is valuable both for visibility and reporting.

Sales can move a lead into a nurture status directly in SugarCRM. That data value passes back to HubSpot to signal to marketing that lead should be part of lead nurturing campaigns.

In addition, sales adds leads directly to SugarCRM. For example, if they generate a new contact or receive an inbound phone call. Those leads sync back to HubSpot. This is the reason why a bi-directional integration is important to us as we have leads coming in from both systems, so we need the integration to keep the lead records de-duplicated and connected.

Zak: What are you doing around opportunities?

Elise: That’s also a part of the integration. We didn’t see any other automation options which connected SugarCRM and HubSpot opportunities. The nice thing about that is for all of our leads that pass from HubSpot to SugarCRM, as those leads advance to opportunities and eventually closed won deals -- that data syncs back from SugarCRM to our HubSpot and powers our HubSpot reporting.

So, for example, the lead sources report in HubSpot shows us which leads sources are not only generating leads, but which ones are resulting in the best source of new customers for us. These are critical insights both to help us demonstrate the impact of marketing and make future decisions around marketing investments.

Zak: Is there anything else interesting around the sync of data between SugarCRM and HubSpot?

Elise: Yes, we have an interesting use case for our customer marketing. One of our services is a subscription service. Once you are part of that subscription service, you are a potential candidate for some of other specific services like succession management.

The way this would work is a lead originally comes in from HubSpot. Then they purchase our subscription service. They would be converted to a customer record in SugarCRM. That custom record from SugarCRM will sync back to HubSpot, with all of their company information and a field noting they are a subscription service customer.

We then use HubSpot workflows to automatically put these people into specific email campaigns that are introducing these additional services to them. This is very valuable to us as most of our big opportunities come from this pool of existing customers.

We are also leveraging HubSpot smart lists to automatically segment our SugarCRM database, based on the data we feed from SugarCRM back to HubSpot. We have hundreds of smart lists in HubSpot, used for segmentation. For example, some of our communications needs to be tailored at the state level - so we need to create smart lists based on state for this targeting.

Recapping How Bedrock Data Helps FP Transitions

Zak: How has Bedrock Data performed for you, as the integration between HubSpot and SugarCRM?

Elise: Bedrock Data has been very effective for us. It ensures we have consistent data between HubSpot and SugarCRM. It makes sure we have the information we need as marketers in our marketing automation platform, and it ensures the information that the rest of our company needs feeds from HubSpot to SugarCRM. So that there are no gaps in information across our business. This is extraordinarily important to us.